AOL chief apologizes for 401(k) gaffe

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It was another rough week for Tim Armstrong and AOL's HR department.

AOL's chief executive had to backtrack on a 401(k) policy change over the weekend after his comments defending the idea fueled employee outrage. Armstrong had said last week that AOL needed the retirement-plan tweak to help offset health care costs, such as two pregnancies that resulted in “distressed babies” with more than $1 million each in medical expenses. Following the outcry, he reversed the 401(k) decision in a memo to employees.

“We heard you on this topic,” Armstrong, 43, said in the memo. “I made a mistake and I apologize for my comments.”

The mea culpa was Armstrong's second in six months for a public controversy. In August, he sent a memo to workers saying he was wrong for firing a creative director in front of a room full of employees, as well as a thousand others who were listening on a conference call. Previously, Armstrong was sued when he worked at Google for a case involving alleged discrimination of a woman pregnant with quadruplets.

Peter Land, a spokesman for New York-based AOL, declined to comment beyond Armstrong's memo. Leslie Miller, a spokeswoman for Google, also declined to comment.

In the latest incident, Armstrong's comments prompted the mother of one of the “distressed babies” to criticize him in an essay she wrote for
Slate.com.

“The hardest thing to bear has been the whiff of judgment in Armstrong's statement, as if we selfishly gobbled up an obscenely large slice of the collective health care pie,” Deanna Fei wrote for the news and analysis website. “We experienced exactly the kind of unforeseeable, unpreventable medical crisis that any health plan is supposed to cover. Isn't that the whole point of health insurance?”

Fei, the mother of one of the infants, wrote on
Slate.com that her daughter weighed 1 pound 9 ounces when born by emergency Caesarean section in October 2012, just five months into an otherwise routine pregnancy. The girl spent three months in a neonatal intensive-care unit.

Even now that her daughter is home and healthy, Fei wrote that she can't take the girl's presence for granted. “All of which made the implication from Armstrong that the saving of her life was an extravagant option, an oversize burden on the company bottom line, feel like a cruel violation, no less brutal for the ludicrousness of his contention,” wrote Fei, a novelist whose husband is an editor at AOL.

When Armstrong was a vice president of national sales for Google in July 2005, employee Christina Elwell sued him and the company in federal court in New York for job discrimination under civil rights law, according to court records.

In the lawsuit, Elwell says that after she became pregnant with quadruplets, three of whom she lost, Armstrong demoted her from national sales director to an operations position, according to the complaint.

At one point, Elwell says, Armstrong called her “an HR nightmare.” He then moved her to a remote cubicle with intern-level responsibility, said Elwell, who was “desperate to preserve her employment with Google.”

Elwell sought a jury trial and unspecified damages. The outcome of the case wasn't immediately apparent in court filings, which show the case was stayed in favor of arbitration in 2007.

AOL competitor Yahoo weathered its own HR controversy last year after CEO Marissa Mayer scaled back work-from-home benefits. Activist groups and workforce consultants criticized the move, saying it would make it harder to attract the best employees and keep them productive. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group Ltd., weighed in on the issue, calling the change a “backwards step.”

Mayer stuck with the new policy, saying it has been well received internally and helped the company develop products more quickly. Innovative new features are being created because workers from different disciplines collaborate closely, she said at a conference in May.

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